Or NZ. I think I maybe get a spam call maybe once a year, or less. I haven't changed my phone number for the last 16 years, so I'm sure I'm on all the lists I could be on at this point. Why is this a problem in the US and not elsewhere?
This must be an American thing. In New Zealand I still use the phone app for talking to people. I've never recieved a spam call - a few calls from companies I already donate too asking for more etc, but that's it.
How many "bad" calls do you get a month?
I'm in the UK, and I used to receive 2-3 spam calls per year. About five years ago, something changed (not my phone number) and I haven't had a single spam call since.
I live in Germany and for whatever reason I have literally never received a spam call here. I can go months without receiving a single call these days. I'm not exactly sure if spam calls are not a thing here or if I've just been lucky. But yeah I see how that can lead to different preferences when it comes to voice mail.
We don't have any problems like this in New Zealand. Maybe I get 1 overseas spam call a month, usually it's a "ringback" scam, where they spoof the caller ID and the phone rings for a half second, they hope you'll be curious and call back the number, which is really a very expensive overseas one.
But no telemarketers or insurance scams or anything like that here.
I, in Australia, had never received a spam call or SMS, until two years ago. I now receive several per day. All automatically blocked, but still.
My number was leaked in a particular data breach that actually had nothing to do with me, but a different family member who had all of their contacts vacuumed up before the breach. So from my perspective it was passive.
As a counterpoint, I've lived in the U.K. most of my life and very rarely get spam calls (maybe ~5 a year). When I do it's almost always people trying to sell stuff / services to my startup.
Report from Canada: I might receive something like three spam calls in the past year.
I don't know why my spam dropped so significantly when I moved up to Canada but it was quite dramatic compared to the US. There are periodic waves but I tend to miss out of them - I suspect because Canada works hard to prevent dumb auto-dialers from working.
It seems to me like such a uniquely American problem for some reason. I've gotten maybe a single spam call in my life in the UK, most people I asked also say they either never got one or got very few. But you go on HN and it seems like people get a deluge of spam calls all the time.
I remember back when I lived in the US, I got daily spam calls. I never get spam calls in Europe. I wonder why that is and if that's still the case (lived there between 2014 and 2018)
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